The guide, which has a short foreword by Maren Deepwell (Chief Executive, Association for Learning Technology) and Joe Wilson (Co-founder, Open Scotland), is a comprehensive summary of how we went about creating Citizen Maths. The guide shares our design principles, the techniques we used to put them into practice, and some of the changes we made in the light of experience.

Our aim is to provide — with the appropriate ‘translation’ to other contexts — a resource that will be useful to teams who are developing online education initiatives.

If you’d like to include contact details of someone in your organisation who can provide local support for people doing the course, you can edit the PDF files of our “empty belly” versions, in A3 and A4. If you would like a supply of printed flyers or posters please contact us.

This site and the Citizen Maths course use ‘cookies’. Cookies are small files, typically of letters and numbers, downloaded on to your device (computer, tablet or smartphone) when you accesses certain websites, and which allow a service-provider to recognise you or your device each time you visit. For more details, please see our cookie policy, and also our privacy policy about how this data is used.

We respect the fact that some people prefer to limit the number of cookies stored by their browser. For this reason we are providing a list of the cookies a user of the course may find that their browser stores, in case you wish to restrict this.

Names of cookies are indicated by italics in what follows.

In order for the Citizen Maths course to recognise who you are, you need to allow course.citizenmaths.com to set and use the gtoken cookie. Both citizenmaths.com and course.citizenmaths.com also use the _ga and _gat cookies for Google Analytics.

As explained in our privacy policy, the course runs on Google Course Builder software. Some of the activities also use Google Sheets (which is free and available ‘in the cloud’ for wide access). Google sets a number of cookies. We have not been able to test whether all of these are critical to the functioning of the course, but recommend that you allow your browser to set and use the cookies listed below. (Please note that Google’s Data Processing and Security Terms for its Cloud Platform mean that Google will not itself process any personal data relating to your participation in Citizen Maths.)

At Citizen Maths we have just released the results of some market research we commissioned to look at the possible costs to individual consumers in the UK of a poor grasp of maths. Here’s what we found:

51% of Britons admit their maths skills aren’t good enough to deal with everyday decisions like offers from supermarkets, phone, broadband, budget airline and utility companies.

84% believe that organisations are exploiting this lack of maths skills, making it hard for consumers to work out the best deals.

Over a quarter of the population suspect they have fallen foul of this repeatedly over the last year.

Britain’s ‘maths confusion’ may be costing consumers as much as £1billion a year.

Citizen Maths cannot help you on its own to achieve GCSE Maths: but it does cover a some important parts of the curriculum; and it may be helpful in getting you started at becoming more confident with maths at GCSE level.

There is no formal qualification available for people who complete Citizen Maths. However, you can use Citizen Maths as part of a learning programme to achieve qualifications.

This document sets out how you could use Citizen Maths to improve your maths in preparation to be a school teacher.

What evidence of competence in maths is required?

Alongside various other standards that you need to be reach, as a prospective teacher, you must satisfy the Department for Education about the level of your mathematical knowledge, including your appreciation of key concepts. In addition, you must take a test of your numeracy skills. You can find details on the Department for Education website.

How can Citizen Maths help you achieve this competence?

If you study Citizen Maths thoroughly, you are likely to gain a better appreciation of mathematics, especially how the five powerful ideas of proportion, representation, uncertainty, measurement and pattern can be useful in your personal, social and working life. This level of understanding of key concepts is very important in becoming an effective teacher of maths. Continue reading →

In recent weeks we’ve added some new features to the way the Citizen Maths course works. The following features are all available now. This is the last planned update to the course before Citizen Maths moves from its project funding (from Ufi Charitable Trust) to an alternative footing, which we will say more about in 2017.

Encouragement by email

We will send you automated email messages to encourage you to achieve significant steps in the course — from just getting started to completing a unit or a whole Powerful Idea. The emails are triggered by your progress, and tell you what you need to do to achieve the next landmark.

You can opt in to receive these encouraging emails when you register for the course, or, if you’re registered, you can opt in or out of this service from your profile page.

Help all in one place

Earlier in the year we did some usability tests with people working their way through the course. We found that they were looking for help on some topics (such as how to undo edits in Scratch) but couldn’t find it, even when it was there and (we had thought) easy to find.

We have now added a new Help page (you need to be logged in to the course to access this) that brings together all Citizen Maths help in one place. Hopefully it really is easy to find now.Continue reading →